What is it about?

This study investigates how different software-producing organizations structure their development and infrastructure teams, or more precisely: how is the division of labor among these groups and how they interact. After carefully analyzing data collected from 44 interviews with software professionals, we identified four common organizational structures: siloed departments, classical DevOps, cross-functional teams, and platform teams.

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Why is it important?

Many organizations wish to adopt DevOps. However, usually, there is some confusion about the meaning of DevOps: would it be about making developers and infrastructure people closer? Would it be about cross-functional teams? Would it be about creating a DevOps team? This study seeks to understand the different options to organize development and infrastructure staff by observing the current industry practice.

Perspectives

This theory could guide researchers and practitioners to think about how to better structure development and infrastructure professionals in software-producing organizations. It also contributes to improving our understanding of the contemporary phenomenon of software production.

Leonardo Leite
University of São Paulo

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This page is a summary of: The organization of software teams in the quest for continuous delivery: A grounded theory approach, Information and Software Technology, November 2021, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.infsof.2021.106672.
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